Creative Tidbits: New Year

by Fred Showker

Kicking off a new year, we find some great posts, including a good one, looking back on a successful year. Others include * The Creativity Crisis * How Creative Are You? * 15 Great Graphic Design Jokes * Photo-Op: What's on Your Bottle? * Graphic designers look back on successful year * Five minutes with... Mike Sullivan, creative director of Mister

The Creativity Crisis

For the first time, research shows that American creativity is declining. What went wrong -- and how we can fix it. Kyung Hee Kim at the College of William & Mary discovered this in May, after analyzing almost 300,000 Torrance scores of children and adults. Kim found creativity scores had been steadily rising, just like IQ scores, until 1990. Since then, creativity scores have consistently inched downward.See also : Forget Brainstorming Full story : www.newsweek.com

How Creative Are You?

Just as an IQ test tracks intelligence, the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking measures your CQ: how well you think creatively. Usually a 90-minute series of discrete tasks administered by a psychologist, the Torrance Test is not a perfect measure of creativity. But it has proven remarkably accurate in predicting creative accomplishments. We asked a group of ordinary children and adults to try their hands at several drawing tests: everyone was presented with incomplete line drawings and was given five minutes to turn them into pictures. We then sent a selection of the results to two well-known creativity scholars. Full story : www.newsweek.com

Photo-Op: What's on Your Bottle?

Very little about fine wine is the same as it was a generation ago. The revolution has engulfed every aspect of the production, sale and consumption of wine -- from screwcaps and stemless wineglasses to the carefully controlled photo-chemistry that has made Argentine Malbec a star. One entertaining change: the use of adventurous graphic design for wine labels. Consider Mollydooker Wines of Australia, whose excellent, affordable wines have inspired a cult following in just four vintages. Full story : Wall Street Journal

Graphic designers look back on successful year

2010 students take national awards, regional scholarships; instructors keep program cutting edge NIC's graphic design program, though lacking the media attention of some other departments, has had a winning year. Graphic Design students Joe Ingalls and Rebecca Meredith were recognized this year as outstanding students in the field of graphic design. Full story : media.www.nicsentinel

Five minutes with... Mike Sullivan, creative director of Mister

"Five minutes with..." is a series of interviews with the freelancers and small studios driving Scotland's creative industries. The idea is simple: each week a different interviewee takes five minutes out to answer five questions and showcases five examples of their work. Mike Sullivan, Creative Director of Glasgow's Mister, an award winning multidisciplinary creative agency that provides graphic design, creative direction and consultancy for digital and print media: brochures, magazines, literature, web, screen, interactive and corporate identity. picture Full story : creativeboom.co.uk

Don't forget ... we encourage you to share your discoveries in the creative world of art, typography, graphics, illustration, photography, sculpture, signs, signing, logos, business graphics and visual communications. Just discuss it in the Design Cafe, or pop out an email to DTG

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